Look! Up on YouTube! It’s maybe the strangest piece of American superhero media ever created! It’s It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman. And If you thought turning the sequel to Joker into a musical was weird, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
More than half a century before Joaquin Phoenix played a Crown Prince of Crime with a song in his heart, Broadway hosted its very own singing Superman. He debuted on Broadway the same year that Adam West’s Batman took over the TV airwaves. But while Batman became an instant pop-culture sensation on ABC, It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman closed after just three months. It was one of the costliest flop in Broadway history to that time.
That in and of itself is not strange; singing superheroes are rarely popular. (Just ask Spider-Man, whose own all-singing, all-dancing, all-injury-prone Broadway show, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was an even bigger financial disaster in the early 2010s.) What’s strange is the show’s impressive pedigree — not to mention the surreal text of the show itself.
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It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman was directed by Hal Prince, one of the most successful Broadway directors in history. (He was one of the men behind the original productions of Sweeney Todd, Cabaret, Evita, On the Twentieth Century, and The Phantom of the Opera.) Its composers had previously worked on Bye Bye Birdie; one would go on to write the songs for Annie.
The play’s book was written by two Esquire magazine staffers named Robert Benton and David Newman. They had zero prior Broadway experience — but a little over a year after It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman’s closure, the pair became the talk of Hollywood thanks to their groundbreaking screenplay for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde. The Oscar-winning film became one of the most influential movies of the ’60s and a foundational work in the so-called “New Hollywood” era.
It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman was … not that. It did not inspire critics to write outraged pans, only to retract them days later and admit they were wrong. (Actually, a lot of the reviews of It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman were pretty good; the New York Times even called it “fun.”) It did not spark a wave of copycat superhero musicals, which is really a bummer, because my full script for The Plastastic World of Plastic Man has been collecting dust on my desk here for years.
Most fundamentally, it was not a Bonnie & Clyde-esque zeitgeist-capturing snapshot of late ’60s cool; A winking send-up of comic-book tropes, it followed the Man of Steel has he battled a mad scientist and fought with Max Mencken, a columnist for the Daily Bugle who hates Superman and Clark Kent, mostly because he secretly lusts after Lois Lane.
Broadway’s Superman was played by Bob Holiday. Because this show ran on Broadway almost a decade after George Reeves’ Adventures of Superman ended its initial run in syndication, and more than ten years before Christopher Reeve made the world believe a man could fly, Holiday got to be the Superman of the late 1960s and into the early 1970s. He would sign autographs for kids in costume as Superman after matinees and appeared on the TV game show I’ve Got a Secret in character as the Man of Steel. He even did a television commercial as Superman, gushing how a splash of Aqua Velva was “cool and refreshing like a quick swim across the Atlantic.”
Although there are no video recordings available online of the original Broadway production (at least that I know about), in 1975 ABC turned It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman into a TV special for their Wide World of Entertainment series. The television version ups the star power a little (The Producers’ Kenneth Mars plays Max Mencken while a young Lesley Ann Warren is Lois Lane) and tweaked the script a bunch, mostly to fit the whole thing into a two-hour block with commercials. (A subplot involving Chinese acrobats was also removed in favor of a storyline involving singing and dancing Italian gangsters.)
The film also “modernized” the show tunes for the funky 1970s — which today makes them sound far more dated than the original cast recordings from 1966. But hey, if you’ve ever felt a Superman movie would have been a lot better if the title character sang a disco tune while beating up bad guys, this will definitely fit the bill.
Some of the film’s meta gags are very similar to the 1960s Batman; like when an unseen narrator (Laugh-In’s Gary Owens) dramatically asks “Will Superman make it in time?” And then after a beat announces “Stay tuned for Chapter 3: ‘Superman Makes It!’” Broadway aficionados also adore “You’ve Got Possibilities,” the show’s best number, sung by another Daily Planet employee with a crush on meek Clark Kent.
But a lot of the Superman musical special is downright bizarre. The bad guys nearly defeat Superman not by dousing his Aqua Velva with Kryptonite, but by shaking his confidence to the point that Superman decides to kill himself. He ties an anchor to his leg and then jumps off Metropolis’ Warren G. Harding Memorial Bridge.
A few scenes later, Superman reemerges from the water, finally realizing that thanks to his super-lungs he can’t drown. (I guess he has super-lungs, not a super-brain.) He then receives a pep talk from two hippies and aspiring comic-book artists named Jerry and Joe — clear analogs for Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. When Superman admits he feels like a freak in a world of normal human beings, Jerry and Joe respond “There’s nothing wrong with being a freak, man, as long as you freak in the right direction!”
“Right on! Lois is in danger! I’m gonna split! Up, up, and far out!” Superman yells before he soars off into the night. (No, really.)
It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman has never gotten a full-fledged Broadway revival, but the material has been revisited by many local theater companies. A 2010 production updated the play’s book to remove some of the campier elements, and transposed its story from the 1960s to the 1930s around the time Superman first debuted, which perhaps fit the innocent tone of the material a little better. A few years after Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman even played the West End in London.
While the TV special version, which you can view in full below, is very silly, I love the pop art sets and Ben Day Dot design aesthetic, and Superman’s big musical number slash fight scene (“Pow! Bam! Zonk!”) is lot of fun . In a world where Superman (and superheroes in general) are so often so dour and grim and violent onscreen, I always have a bit of a soft spot for DC adaptions that are whimsical and fun and innocent. It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman is all of that. It may not be perfect. But it’s definitely a show with possibilities.
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